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[ExciteMike]

Well, I think the game is finally presentable enough to start a thread on it.

A demake of Super Mario Galaxy to the DS. 

You can get it here. To play, just use the mouse and space bar.
http://www.meyermike.com/SuperMaria/SuperMaria.zip (EDIT:  The ATI problem seems to be fixed with latest version of this)

And of course I welcome feedback. (preferably constructive, but I'm not picky)

screens:

[muku]

I'd love to give this a try, but the title screen runs at about 1 frame per second here. This is on Win2k with a Radeon 9500. You must be doing something odd

[ExciteMike]

Holy crap.  Now I will probably spend the rest of the time until the deadline trying to figure out how that is possible.

[ChrisFranklin]

This is great!  My only complaint is that the touch-controlled walk can sometimes be difficult to get around, as there were times I felt I was pointing in the right place but Maria wouldn't move.  Still, the mechanics and physics are great, and I love that a level editor is included.  Good show!

[ExciteMike]

Re-uploaded with yet another DLL that in theory every windows machine should already have, but some apparently do not.  That could conceivably have been related to what muku saw, but I have my doubts.
That idea turned out to be all kinds of horrible.

[muku]

Dude, now it won't start at all and instead complains about the function "IsWow64Process" not being found in kernel32.dll. I've never heard of that function in my life before...

[Synnah]

I had the same problem as Muku on a WinXP PC with a Radeon X1600. Could be an issue with ATI cards? Not only was it running at 1FPS, but the graphics were corrupted. I've attached a screenshot. I'll try it on my GeForce 8600 when I get home, anyway, as this looks rather nice.

[ExciteMike]

Okay so I have a theory about what is causing it to break so terribly.  Could someone who saw the problem download http://meyermike.com//SuperMaria/pow2fix.zip and see if this version runs ok?

[MekanikDestructiwKommando]

Second version runs SMOOTHLY.
First version never even acknowledged my clicking 

[ExciteMike]

Whew! Thanks folks.  So the moral is: NVidia lets you get away with non-power-of-2 textures. ATI will suck big time.

[muku]

Whew! Thanks folks.  So the moral is: NVidia lets you get away with non-power-of-2 textures. ATI will suck big time.

Are you using OpenGL? There's an extension (it's called something like "rectangular textures", might have to google it) which allows you to do that and should be pretty universally supported by now. But with standard OpenGL calls, you can only do power of two textures (portably) AFAIK. I don't know how D3D handles it.

EDIT: New version works flawlessly! Sometimes the character seems to get slightly stuck in tight spots, but nothing that's too bad. Overall it's really fun, make more levels!

Plus, "Conglaturations" is awesome :D I had no idea what the endgame text was trying to tell me, but I liked it anyway.

[György Straub]

glad I booted into Windows.

This is so much awesome. Loving the name and the very rewarding "Conglaturation!" text, and the DS look-and-feel is highly sexy.=) Congrats!

[Ciardhubh]

With more levels and a bit of variety in scenery, this would probably be a nice casual game. The level editor is interesting, too. Dragging and clicking in the upper screen to move the viewport would make it easier to use. I like the mouse/pen idea

[ExciteMike]

http://www.meyermike.com/SuperMaria/SuperMaria.zip
Sounds, animations, and levels in which you can actually lose!

[ExciteMike]

I've got a few days left but this feels like a good spot to stop and call the game finished. 
It kind of dawned on me partway through that all the stuff I wanted to add was mimicking Donkey Kong '94.  And while that game would probably go in my Top 5 Games of All Eternity list, remaking it with funny gravity doesn't seem like something I want to spend any more time on.

[Saint]

Whew! Thanks folks.  So the moral is: NVidia lets you get away with non-power-of-2 textures. ATI will suck big time.

Here's the low-down... Skip to the code if you only want a solution:

There is an extension called ARB_TEXTURE_NON_POWER_OF_TWO that allows you to use NPOT textures just like you would any other kind of texture. It was included in the 1.5 standard (if my memory serves me correctly), but while AMD GPG (Formerly ATI) supports most of the features of even later GL iterations, they don't officially support that standard.

Instead, ATI has the extension EXT_TEXTURE_RECTANGLE (this is also available on NVidia cards, btw) that essentially creates a new texture target that you can bind NPOT textures to, GL_TEXTURE_RECTANGLE. This texture target has three distinct differences from GL_TEXTURE_2D;
- It cannot have mipmaps
- It cannot have tiling, only clamp and edge clamp are valid values
- You assign coordinates in image-space and not normalized (so 0..w,0..h instead of 0..1,0..1)
Of course this is a pain to use since you can't process texcoords the normal way, and ATI thought of this and made a driver fix so you can use NPOT textures with GL_TEXTURE_2D and get normalized texcoords - as long as you abide by the other rules. Note that this only applies to hardware that actually supports EXT_TEXTURE_RECTANGLE, some mobility cards and non-windows drivers don't have the fix.

So; to use NPOT textures safely in OpenGL; make sure to call these once you've created the texture and you should be okay:

Code:

glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D,GL_TEXTURE_MAG_FILTER,GL_LINEAR);
glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D,GL_TEXTURE_MIN_FILTER,GL_NEAREST);
glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D,GL_TEXTURE_WRAP_S,GL_CLAMP);
glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D,GL_TEXTURE_WRAP_T,GL_CLAMP);

... Of course, NPOT textures are inherently slower to do lookups in than POT textures so you should strive to create POT textures when reasonably possible.

[ExciteMike]

Thanks for the info!  My solution was to pad non-power-of-2 textures to get them up to the next highest power of 2.  That did introduce some artifacts along the edges of my sprites due to bilinear filtering, but I happened to want GL_NEAREST for this game anyway so that a sprite at (0.5, 0.5) doesn't go all blurry.  I'll definitely look into EXT_TEXTURE_RECTANGLE for my next game!

[Saint]

Thanks for the info!  My solution was to pad non-power-of-2 textures to get them up to the next highest power of 2.  That did introduce some artifacts along the edges of my sprites due to bilinear filtering, but I happened to want GL_NEAREST for this game anyway so that a sprite at (0.5, 0.5) doesn't go all blurry.  I'll definitely look into EXT_TEXTURE_RECTANGLE for my next game!

It's a tricky thing, that, and I had the problem myself. The thing to remember is that if you want a pixel-perfect representation at all times you can't just use the texture borders as texcoords, you'll actually want to use the center of the first and last pixel - that is, half a unit from the edge (or 1.0/512.0 for a 256 - texture image). If you don't, it'll look off as soon as you try to rotate a sprite or move it in non-pixel sized units.

I would personally recommend just using NPOT textures as is, though, as it's cleaner to have uniform units for all textures, but that's entirely up to you. The information about EXT_TEXTURE_RECTANGLE is in the OpenGL extension registry http://www.opengl.org/registry/ ...

[thewreck]

Hi! first of all! awesome stuff. The engine feels very solid and despite me not having played super mario galaxy this sure felt genuine!

Secondly, since you wanted constructive feedback, here comes my 2 cents (keep in mind i have a ):

The first levels (before the first fire level) were very obvious. Just from a glance at the minimap, you would know exactly what to do, and for the following 30 seconds, you would just execute your laid out plan. This was a little tedious.

The first fire level was very good. It had that non-obvious solution, since you felt like you could complete the level only by looking at the bottom screen, but then you had to figure it out by checking up and taking another path. I think the key about this level is that once you figured it out, it only took a couple of seconds to beat. Thats good!

The second fire level i had lots of trouble with. I quickly understood what to do, but this time, it was alot harder to actually execute! This would have been fine, except for two things: every time i died the "failure" screen popped up, without any way to skip it (please make it possible to skip right back to the game!). Secondly, whenever the level started, the camera was way off and had to scroll to the player, adding more wait before being able to try again, and I tried to skip the camera scrolling by pressing various buttons, but the problem was, that if you jumped from the default starting position, you died, so then i had to wait again, and again, and again.. =(... This is what made me stop in the end.

So thats my feedback, hope it help!

[UltraJMan]

It was clever and entertaining but... incredibly short, just when it started getting rough and thoughtful with design it just up and ended. I guess the level edit makes up for that though.